June 29 ~ True Conviction is the Quiet Knowledge that Your Path is True

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1 Kings 19:15-16, 19-21

Psalm 16

Galatians 5:1, 13-25

Luke 9:51-62

(The content of this sermon was 100% written in Canada by a human)

It has now been 20 years since I was introduced to one of the most remarkable people I have ever met. More than ten years ago, I spoke of Fahima Osman in a sermon. Fahima was discovered by a certain Globe writer I know, who had been given the challenge of finding the first Canadian-trained doctor to be produced by Toronto’s Somali community. The Globe found Fahima close to graduating from medical school at McMaster University, having defied the greatest of odds to get there. She arrived in Canada at the age of 11, crossing in from the United States with her parents and her younger siblings, with few family photos and a couple of bags of luggage. Her family was poor and had to start over from scratch. Fahima held down a part-time job to help pay the bills and studied with As posted up around her desk to remind her of her goals – in defiance of teachers who had told her not to aim so high. Her parents didn’t know any doctors to help her make connections, and when she got into medical school, she arrived without any mentors. And yet a year after The Globe story, Dr. Fahima Osman graduated from McMaster.

When I met Fahima, it was clear how she had achieved this goal: she was fierce and smart and determined, and she had the loving support of her family and siblings.

Erin remained in touch with her, and recently this year, followed up with a story to update us on where she has landed now. She is an experienced breast cancer surgeon. In these past years, Dr. Osman has worked diligently to improve patient care in Canada and to educate women about breast cancer. She will start this month at a new job, working exclusively as a cancer surgeon, while also training upcoming med students how to innovate and become entrepreneurs in their own right.

When asked if she would ever consider leaving Canada for a larger salary in the United States, Dr. Osman was unequivocal: she would never leave the Canada that had welcomed her family so long ago. Her goal, she said, is to improve the system, serve her patients, and fall asleep each night, knowing she has done her best.

When I hear the political discourse about newcomers to Canada, and some of the hate that seeps across the border from the United States, I always think of Fahima Osman, and wonder: are we doing all we can to create more proud Canadians like her?

This Canada Day, especially, is a moment to consider our values, to ask what we are celebrating. As a country, we have been, mostly to our credit, pretty good at self-criticism, at recognizing our failings and injustice, particularly to Indigenous Canadians, and trying, though imperfectly, to make amends. Around the world, we see democracies and cultures of openness and tolerance under threat, and we are called to look within ourselves and ask, what will we safeguard here in this country built by immigrants? An advertisement I heard recently pointed out that when you go to an airport, where people are coming and going from all parts of the country and world, anyone and everyone is or could be Canadian. You have only to travel yourself to know that this is a unique accomplishment of diversity.

The story of Fahima returned to me this week – not just because it’s Canada Day weekend – but because of the lesson in the gospel. Jesus sounds at his most severe. He has met someone in a village on his way to Jerusalem. “Follow me,” he tells the person. “I will follow you,” the person agrees. “But let me first say farewell to those at home.” That doesn’t seem unreasonable – after all, back then, leaving home often meant never going back again, especially travelling with Jesus into his risky future. But Jesus is stern: “No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the Reign of God.”

That’s pretty harsh. I know if I were heading off on a potential one-way journey, I might want to say good-bye to a couple of people I live with, let them know what happened to me. But Jesus is having none of it: Come now or don’t bother at all, he seems to be saying. That’s a lot to ask.

But what does he really mean? These days, it seems we are full of buts, maybes, perhapses, or we’ll sees. We hesitate when we should act. We deliberate when the choice is clear. Only a literalist would assume Jesus was urging young people to abandon their families without a word – after all, he valued his own family, including the disciples, and took great care, as we learn later, with his own reassuring goodbyes.

Jesus was saying something deeper than that. He was saying if you are going even to try to follow the gospel, you’d better be all in. You can’t do it halfway, or when it’s convenient, or when the right people are looking. Sometimes, you have to make the world a better place without the chance to put your affairs in order.

And think about it – it’s hard enough to uphold a value when you believe it to be unbendable. If you are fluttering about a principle like a leaf, someone is going to come along and blow you down. You couldn’t go into the gospel – and you certainly couldn’t join Jesus back then – if you weren’t willing to take some pretty clear risks and make some obvious sacrifices. You had to be all in. No looking back. Committed.

Jesus also knew we’d mess up and have to start again. It’s like anything we put our hand to – if we aren’t committed to it, when things start to go a little wrong, we bail right way. It’s like the job that you really want to quit the first two weeks, but then you realize a month in that it’s where you want to be. Or the skill you want to learn, that’s really hard work in the beginning. Or the country that you believe in, that occasionally disappoints you. If you aren’t committed, why would you keep trying? Hit the first roadblock, and who wouldn’t bail?

So that’s what Jesus is really saying: it’s a hard road, and you’d better be sure you want to be on it, so that even if you fall along the way, you’ll find the strength to get up. Only in this way are great countries born, and communities built – because adversity strikes and fires rage and floods happen – and you have to keep going. Indeed, Fahima Osman is an example of this – through sheer will and determination she succeeded. She was all in, fierce and committed.

Many of us will know some young graduates – like Dr. Osman so many years ago -leaving one stage of life and entering another – heading off to university, or to a new school, the next step in getting older. One of the qualities that I would most want for them – as a pastor and a parent – is the power of conviction: not just knowing what is right but holding to it. This is the same posture I wish for my country, as a Canadian: that despite a more dangerous and uncertain world, Canada remains an example of tolerance and justice, humility and hope, of the importance of recognizing mistakes and working to correct them, of the strength of diversity. If those convictions hold, then we shall face this unsettled time without losing ourselves.

That’s what Jesus was saying. Without conviction in the gospel– without that quiet force of will – the world will break us. Conviction isn’t brash. Conviction isn’t about bragging. And it certainly isn’t staying on a path for the sake of staying on a path. True conviction, as Jesus so clearly demonstrated with his own life, is the quiet knowledge that your path is true, and that you won’t be turned from it. Amen